Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba started November off with a bang. The company made US$17.79 billion during its Singles Day sale on Nov. 11, a 32 percent jump from last year. Compare that to Amazon's $32.71 billion in revenue for an entire quarter! The annual sale began in 2009 as a way to persuade millions of single Chinese people to purchase gifts for themselves. Since 2009, the event has grown from 27 participating merchants to nearly 100,000.

Now senior director for online analytics and business intelligence at Sears, Pickett has been an early champion of the so-called citizen data scientist movement, by which employees in multiple parts of an organization are empowered with the analytics tools and skills to get the answers they need from their data.

Enterprise mobility is often a tug-of-war between freedom-seeking employees and security-minded IT departments, but VMware aims to make those differences go away. The virtualization giant on Tuesday rolled out a brand-new platform along with two key updates it says will help keep everyone happy.

Developed in part with the "bring your own device" trend in mind, Workspace One gives companies a single tool for delivering digital workspaces that aggregate all devices, applications and services while securely managing them through unified common access and identity.

Single-Sign On access, for example, leverages Secure App Token Systems for authentication. Once authenticated, employees gain instant self-service access to a personalized enterprise application store where they can subscribe to virtually any mobile, cloud or Windows application.

Small businesses that use Kronos workforce-management software will soon be able to tap familiar Google tools in their HR efforts thanks to a new integration project now under way.

Kronos and Google have teamed up to integrate Google Apps for Work with the Kronos Workforce Ready cloud suite for small and midsize businesses, Kronos announced Tuesday, giving SMBs new ability to engage office employees and remote workers via familiar Google Apps and mobile devices.

Through an integration with Google Calendar, for instance, employee work schedules created in Workforce Ready will automatically be synced to their personal calendars, meaning workers won't have to wait until the schedule is posted to see their assigned shifts.

The rise in BYOD has left businesses struggling to manage the growing number of access points across their systems. A recent study conducted by Bitglass found that 57 percent of employees and 38 percent of IT professionals don’t participate in their company’s BYOD program due to privacy concerns, that corporate leadership would have too much visibility into the end user’s personal data.

Of course, that doesn’t stop employees from using their own devices, circumventing official policy. And when your employees are ignoring your BYOD strategy, it means something isn’t working and the time has come to re-evaluate your plan.

All good things come to an end, especially things that might seem too good to be true. Like Microsoft OneDrive's unlimited storage for all Office 365 subscribers. Subscriptions will now be limited to 1TB of OneDrive storage and free OneDrive storage will also be reduced from 15GB to 5GB.

Since we started to roll out unlimited cloud storage to Office 365 consumer subscribers, a small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings. In some instances, this exceeded 75 TB per user or 14,000 times the average. Instead of focusing on extreme backup scenarios, we want to remain focused on delivering high-value productivity and collaboration experiences that benefit the majority of OneDrive users.

In hard numbers, the prevalence of BYOD in the workplace is difficult to measure. Researchers offer a wide variety of statistics.

Research firm Strategy Analytics, for example, said three-quarters of business smartphones and tablets shipped in the second quarter in North America were slated to wind up in the workplace -- either bought by businesses outright for their workers or by people who planned to use them in the office.

Many modern companies, large and small, are adopting employee wellness programs, which often include fitness challenges that take advantage of wearable technologies. These programs can help lower healthcare costs, reduce absenteeism and increase productivity, but they can also subject companies to legal challenges or otherwise backfire without proper implementation.

At Fitbit's recent Captivate 2015 conference in San Francisco, experts from various industries shared tips, best practices and lessons learned from their experiences with fitness and wellness programs tied to wearables. The multi-location conference, which debuted in Chicago on September 16, had about 130 attendees in San Francisco on September 29, and it moves on to the final destination, New York, on October 13. Here are some of the best tips from the speakers in San Francisco.

If there's one thing that can strike terror into a CIO's heart, it's the security implications of the cloud; if there's another, it's the "bring your own" technology trend. Combine the two, and you've got the motivation behind IBM's new Cloud Security Enforcer.

Thanks to having set up used a private email server while U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton has become a poster child for "shadow IT," or the phenomenon by which employees bring their own technologies into the workplace, but there's no denying its prevalence. One-third of Fortune 1000 employees share and upload corporate data on third-party cloud apps, according to a recent IBM Security study. One in four link to cloud apps using a corporate log-in and password.

You’d think after all this time that organizations would have finally gotten BYOD programs pretty much down pat. Don’t bet on it.

A recent study by tyntec reveals that a vast majority of organizations still have inadequate bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies. That’s not very encouraging, considering that 49 percent of workers now use a personal mobile device for work-related tasks and spend a great deal of time on personal devices for their job.

Further, the typical U.S. worker now expects to have nothing less than total access – anywhere, anytime, from any device – to their employer’s networks, finds another study from Dell and Intel. But despite all this demand on the user side, many organizations still wrestle with security, privacy and support issues around BYOD. That is holding many employers back when it comes to giving BYOD an enthusiastic ‘thumbs up’.

Apple's iPad -- no matter the generation -- is usually at the top of most "best tablets" lists. That remains true with the latest iPad Air 2 - and will probably be true when the just-announced iPad Pro becomes available. However, while the iPad offers a lot in the way of performance and design, when it comes to productivity, you might find it lacking in some areas. Without the option to use a mouse, split-screen apps and a lack of expandable storage, it may not measure up for your business needs. Or maybe you're just tired of the same old tablet and want to try something new. Whatever your reason, if you want to stray from Apple, here are five iPad alternatives that can easily move your office to your couch.

Government CIOs have been struggling mightily with developing prudent policies to enable employees to use their personal mobile devices for work without putting sensitive information at risk or otherwise compromising the security of agency systems.

Can't remember whatshername who works in HR or don't remember the title of whatshisname your boss introduced you to last week? LinkedIn Lookup is here to help you find and learn about your coworkers.

The new iPhone app lets you search coworkers by name, title, skills, and more. When you click on a profile of one of your coworkers, you'll get his or her work details and experience (taken from LinkedIn, of course) and contact information (if it was added to Lookup). Even if the coworker's contact preferences aren't in Lookup, you could send a message from the app that will be delivered to their mobile phone.

This app obviously works best if you work for a large or medium-sized company, and don't work with just one group of people regularly. In that case, I could see how this app could be beneficial to the employees and the company as well (especially those companies that find it hard to update their intranets' information).

That's still mostly true today for mechanical hard drives as well as SATA III based SSD's but a new class of SSD is becoming affordable to the average consumer - PCIe SSD.

Using the PCI Express channel which has become standard on motherboards over the past decade, the PCIe SSD gains additional bandwidth using the faster interface combined with advances in flash storage and an emerging standard called Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe).

Toshiba is rolling out two activity trackers that can help caregivers monitor seniors remotely.

Through an analysis of sensor data, the Silmee W20 and W21 wristbands can help track the amount of time a user spends eating as well as conversing with others. The bands can compile the data into life logs to be shared with caregivers.

The sensors on the bands include a skin temperature sensor, a pulse monitor and an ultraviolet light sensor, as well as an accelerometer. An emergency button on the bands can alert caregivers or loved ones.

The bands also have Bluetooth connectivity for linking with iOS and Android mobile devices, and lithium-ion batteries that can last about two weeks on a charge. The W21 also features a GPS module for location tracking.

Japanese researchers have developed stretchable, tough electronics that could be incorporated into clothing - transforming wearable technology.

The flexible transistors can take a serious beating and can even be laundered along with clothing, according to the researchers from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) and the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST).

Possible applications include embedding the transistors into clothing to monitor health signs, as well as using them for the basis of synthetic sensitive skin covering humanoid robots.

All electronic devices developed so far contain brittle materials such as metals and thus cannot live up to the natural softness and flexibility of clothing, AIST researcher Atsuko Sekiguchi and colleagues wrote in the journal Nano Letters.

The bird’s-eye views are a reminder that drones are increasingly present when disasters strike. Their use has attracted criticism, particularly when amateurs interfere with relief and rescue efforts, but they can also be a valuable tool for gathering information.

Apple and Intel are both making progress in their efforts to hire more women and minorities, according to figures released by the companies this week.

In the first six months of the year, more than 43 percent of Intel’s hires in the U.S. were women and minorities, up from 32 percent at the end of 2014, the company reported in its first mid-year diversity report.

At 43 percent, Intel said it was surpassing the 40 percent diversity hiring goal it set for itself for the full year.

Apple, meanwhile, boosted its hiring of women by 65 percent globally over the past year, to 11,000, the company said in its second annual report.

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ConsumerizationConsumer ElectronicsBusinessData CenterCareersInternet of ThingsNetworkingCloud ComputingSoftware as a Service (SaaS)CollaborationVideo ConferencingSoftwareMicrosoft Outlook is now much more capable with add-ins for other appsThu, 13 Aug 2015 16:15:00 -0700Melanie PinolaMelanie Pinola

As capable and powerful as Microsoft Outlook has always been, the email program has never really played well with other apps besides other Office programs. Compared to the gazillion apps and services you can link Gmail with, Outlook seemed behind the times. This week, though, Microsoft announced new partnerships with Evernote, Yelp, IFTTT, and Wunderlist, as well as other apps, to make Outlook (and you) more connected.

An Uber add-in lets you set up a ride reminder for any calendar event within Outlook, swipe the notification and confirm the Uber ride, and have your car on the way for your next meeting or event. You can use the PayPal add-in to send money to people directly from an email, the Boomerang add-in to schedule emails to send at a specific time, and, my favorite, clip emails from Outlook to Evernote.